Editorial | Navigating the MOU 

If this newspaper were to advise Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness on his government’s embrace of America’s global outsourcing of its obligations to asylum seekers and refugees, it would be that he clearly defines the issues within strategic foreign policy goals. He must also speak frankly to Jamaicans about the realities and the limited ability to manoeuvre in dealing with the Trump administration.

In other words, by telling the unvarnished truth, Dr Holness has the best chance of building consensus on the issue, as well as for any red lines Jamaica establishes in protection of its sovereignty and citizens’ sense of themselves and their country.

Put another way, Jamaica’s decision — in common with 27 other countries — to accept third-country nationals (TCNs) cannot be separated from Donald Trump’s reassertion, in a national security strategy document issued last November, of the Monroe Doctrine and the agenda Kari Lake, the US ambassador-designate to Jamaica, has signalled she intends to pursue in Kingston.

As was first reported by The Gleaner, and since confirmed by local authorities, Jamaica agreed to accept, under a quasi-safe-harbour arrangement, people who would wish to settle in the United States but whom America does not want. According to Prime Minister Holness, Jamaica will receive up to 25 people per fortnight.

However, a diplomatic note from the US Embassy confirming a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to govern the programme, spoke of Jamaica receiving “up to 10,000 third-country nationals”, which presumably refers to the total number that would be sent over the life of the agreement.

Under international law, the norm is for people who arrive in a country seeking asylum or refugee status to be processed in that state. People who otherwise enter a country illegally are generally deported directly to their home territories. However, it is, in some instances, permissible, with respect to asylum seekers and refugees, to send them to third countries if the receiving states guarantee their safety and freedom from persecution.

The Trump administration, which has made immigration control —especially migration from the Global South — a key policy plank, has leaned on several developing countries, including six members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), to accept these arrangements, although the transferees’ safety and security are not always assured. For instance, in El Salvador, whose strongman president, Nayib Bukele, has detained two per cent of the country’s population in a years-long state of emergency, foreign nationals have been held in the same high-security detention centres.

While they claimed not to have been pressured by Washington to accept TCNs, Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica joined the scheme after the United States expressed its displeasure over how they ran their citizenship-by-investment (CIP) programmes and announced visa restrictions on their nationals. St Kitts and Nevis and St Lucia, which also have CIP programmes, soon agreed to accept TCNs.

However, Prime Minister Holness has rejected claims that his government was pressured into the agreement.

“Jamaica has been asked to do many things before, and we have not,” Dr Holness said in an interview on Nationwide Radio. “We have made sure it (the agreement) complies with our laws, suits our political timetable, advances our interests, and is in the interest of our friends.”

The Gleaner’s Editorial Board accepts the Government’s assurance at face value, but is also cognisant of the tendency of the mercurial, and often irrational, Mr Trump to flex America’s economic and military might.

Jamaica, as a close neighbour of the United States, with a heavy dependence on the US market for tourism and trade, cannot be oblivious to America’s power. This is further complicated by the fact that over a million of the island’s nationals live in the United States.

Indeed, Mr Trump has also pressed America’s hegemonic interests in the Americas, which he has given practical expression through the rendition of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and in the use of the US military to extrajudicially destroy alleged drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean.

Another critical policy plank of the United States is to remove, or significantly lessen, China’s perceived influence in the Caribbean. Indeed, while her confirmation testimony in the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee was largely measured, Ms Lake left no doubt about her anti-China objective in Jamaica, which could impact what has long been Jamaica’s only significant source of development financing.

“...I think it is concerning for both sides of the aisle when it comes to what China has done and their influence so close to home,” she said.

Ms Lake also focused specifically on China Merchants Port Holdings’ 49 per cent stake in Terminal Link, which controls Kingston Freeport Terminal Limited (KFTL), the island’s largest and most sophisticated port. “...That puts us at risk, so we need to rebalance things,” Ms Lake said.

That sentiment echoes the pressure the Trump administration placed on Panama to abrogate the Hong Kong company CK Hutchison’s control of two ports in the Panama Canal zone. This was achieved when Panama’s Supreme Court eventually ruled that the more than two-decade-old deal was unconstitutional.

If such pressures were to face Jamaica, the Government would be in a better position to manoeuvre if there were national consensus on the matter.